Virtualization is Performance Management. My Inbox Proves It.

I woke up the other morning to find four different emails in my Inbox from three different vendors who do performance management for virtual environments.

The first was from VKernel, who was announcing an update to their freeware VM Stats tool for VMware environments. Downloadable from http://www.vkernel.com/download/vm-stats, this tool analyzes your environment to show you important performance and capacity metrics.

If you’ve spent any time with virtualization you’ve likely heard these names before. But while their products are great, it’s the volume of information I keep seeing related to virtualization and performance management that keeps reminding me why virtualization is performance management.

It doesn’t matter which hypervisor you choose. It doesn’t matter what you’re using virtualization for. It doesn’t matter what technologies – storage, server, network, whatever – that you use to enable virtualization. What is fundamentally important is that you correctly manage the performance of your virtual environments.

Why? Because virtualization for most of us is about consolidation. When we can squeeze more VMs onto fewer hosts, we’re getting better results for our virtualization dollar.

But what still confuses me is how few virtualized environments, notwithstanding their sometimes substantial investment in hypervisor technologies, have spent the comparatively few extra dollars on tools to monitor its performance.

You’ll hear me state over and over in this community that “performance management is job one in virtualization”. If you’re not doing it today, using a holistic solution from vendors like those that are spamming my Inbox, then you’re doing your users and your virtual environment a disservice.